Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda and has published articles in Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.
"'A masterful and captivating book that rescues one of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth-century Syria from obscurity. Mikha'il Mishaqa bursts from the pages as a three-dimensional character and a pioneer in the debates on secularism and religious freedom in the modern Arab world. An outstanding intellectual biography.' -- Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs 'Deeply researched and engagingly written, Prophet of Reason gives us the turbulent life of a remarkable individual. But Mikha’il Mishaqa’s circuitous intellectual and professional path through the political, socioeconomic, and ideological ferment of nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon illuminates a larger canvas of independent spiritual restlessness and institutional rebellion that challenges received notions of ""sectarian"" identities and fixed orthodoxies in the shifting colonial world of the global nineteenth century. Peter Hill’s sympathetic and beautifully contextualised study is at once a gripping biography and an intellectual history of how religious faith and doubt, legacies of rational thinking both local and far-flung, and human networks—contentious and affectionate—were fluid shapers of a history we too often view as set in stone.' -- Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World"